Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The following stats are taken from my guild's very first raid night downing the "real" (non-vehicle) bosses in Ulduar. It was a ten-man raid, and the tanks were a prot pally and a prot warrior. A holy priest was healing with me, though the enhancement shaman certainly made a showing with his heals off of Spirit Hunt and Healing Stream Totem.

First, a look at the spells I used:

LIFEBLOOM:I used lifebloom far more than I had expected to. I'm uncertain of how much this will remain as we grow more comfortable with the instance, and how much may be on group makeup (who I'm healing with). The breakdown on my lifebloom targets is such:

Percent breakdown of my Lifebloom Targets

Tanks:

85% (61% and 24%)

Myself:

4%

Others:

11%

As I did 50% of each of the tanks' total healing received myself, lifebloom obviously still is a superior tank healing spell from raw healing done. Among the tanks in the raid, one in particular received 61% of all of my lifebloom healing, as I did try to limit myself to one tank with a rolling stack of lifeblooms.

Now, one change I did notice is that the blooms' healing was being properly credited to me, where it used to be counted as the person's own heal (much like Leader of the Pack). Of course, this resulted in my lifebloom overheal reaching over 30%, mostly due to the large blooms being wasted as combat wore off, etc.

REVITALIZE:With Wild Growth and Rejuvenation making up 41% of my total healing done, Revitalize had plenty of chances to proc. I cast Rejuvenation approx 635 times (the feral druid cast it at least once). WWS does not show how many times I cast Wild Growth, and the number of targets hit was too varied to make a good estimate on how often I had cast it. Unfortunately, the log file only says who gained WG, rather than making note of me casting it. I could probably go through the log and manually count based off of the cooldown on Wild Growth... but I'm not THAT insane.

The following numbers were quoted for revitalize (the raid was 4 hours long):

Player

Role

Total Regen

# Ticks

Avg Amnt

Max Amnt

Alyae

Tank

15,649

236

66

80

Rambridge

Tank

452

113

4

4

Kaelynn

Healer

15,894

83

191

198

Kuchki

Healer

9,745

51

191

198

Kitarha

DPS

1,072

67

16

16

Celeritas

DPS

979

67

14

79

Razhakal

DPS

8,964

49

182

201

Tuku

DPS

7,895

59

133

136

Keltsett

DPS

6,891

54

127

129

Grommsol

DPS

6,053

46

131

133

Spirit Wolf

DPS

24

6

4

4

ArmyOTDead

DPS

32

4

8

8

DK Ghoul

DPS

80

10

8

8

Over 15k mana was returned to myself and to the prot pally, and 452 rage to the prot warrior: the three I targeted most often for my rejuvenation spells. The 3 melee dps: DK, feral druid, and enhancement shaman saw my next-most-often use of rejuvenation (40+ rejuvs applied each), and then the ranged and pets. Hunter pets did not get earmarked by WWS to have received any procs of revitalize, though the shaman and DK pets did.

The average and max tick amounts on the feral druid are not reliable. Celeritas' numbers are twisted by the fact that they weren't all energy: he was sometimes in bear, and sometimes in caster form when revitalize procced, so these numbers are not reliable for him. The amount gained in cat form would be 8 energy per tick... which was his form for the majority of the raid.

Most of the revitalization on the ranged dps came from procs off of wild growth.

NOURISH vs REGROWTH:With about the same crit percent, I cast Regrowth half as often as Nourish, yet they did about the same amount of my total healing because of the HoT portion of the regrowth. I am certain that nourish will pull away by 5% or more once I get it glyphed, and when I remove the regrowth glyph. I was using regrowth as a heal+hot, and nourish as a "flash heal."

Overall, both of these spells made up significantly more of my healing than they did in Naxx. I had to help heal the tanks far more, and the raid wasn't safe with just HoTs. People needed direct heals WITH their hots, so nourish and regrowth suddenly took a larger role in my healing than previously.

LIVING SEED:Did 3% of my total healing done, with only a 17% overheal, which is less than the overheal that I got off of lifebloom or nourish, and roughly the same amount of overheal as I got with regrowth. It averaged 3.2k per seed (resulting from regrowths and nourishes), and one seed was as much as 10k (from a large HT crit)! EDIT: recent parses have increased the average to almost 4k... yay. Purely passive bonus healing off of my crit-happy regrowths and nourishes? Yes please, talent points well spent.

Consider in comparison how important Swiftmend and NS+HT are, and their relative % of my healing done. I have to actually cast those, and I think people would die if I didn't. Living Seed is passive, and nourish is critting all over the place now. The seeds can be wasted on dps as they aren't hit near as often as the tank, but meh, their place on the tanks feels plenty important enough.

Living Seed still won't be useful for druids who do not cast nourish, swiftmend, or regrowth (or HT) very often, since it is crit-dependant... nor for druids who do not usually heal the tanks, since it only blooms when the person is next hit. It will be extremely useful for druids who fancy themselves as MT healers. Since I heal both (raid and tanks), I'm loving it for the tank-side of my healing.

CRITS:These numbers got big, and some were far larger than I'm used to.

Heal

Max Crit

Lifebloom

26,406

Nourish

15,029

Regrowth

10,317

Swiftmend

20,459

NS+HT

19,605

Yum. Lifebloom bloom crit for massively huge numbers (probably a 3-stack). I wonder how much of that was overheal? Ha. I do know that that particular listed NS+HT crit was pure overheal... the tank used Lay on Hands right as I cast it ><

THORNS:Heh heh heh 200+ damage. The main tank got up to a maximum of 321 damage off of a thorns hit, which was probably charged by the shaman's stormstrikes. Good times. Take that, Anubisath Defenders!! Totally making sure this is always on the tanks from now on.

Thorns did 3% of the prot pally's damage for the night... though only 1% of the prot warrior's.

Summary:

Ulduar and 3.1 have forced a change in my healing, one that I will continue to adapt to fit the situation. Revitalize and Living Seed have seen an increase in usefulness, and Nourish is certainly an important flash-heal now. Thorns is now superior to ret aura's damage, particularly around enhancement shammies.

The blooms from lifebloom are something I still need to learn to work with, but I can see they fall into 3 major Bloom categories:

3-stacked blooms for the raw heal on a tank, which crit up past 26k

1-stack bloom for mana refund after it applied its healing, be it a tank or otherwise

I mostly dug in cuz I wanted to see the revitalize numbers :) Found a veritable treasure-trove, and wanted to know where I stood so that I would have a better perspective as the guild grew more comfortable in the instance.

The past two raid nights I've been watching my own numbers on recount. Lifebloom/Rejuv/WG are still taking the top 3 spots, but they vary a lot in which wins out as most-used in any given encounter. Rejuvenation was up to 35% of my healing on one boss fight, while lifebloom took care of 50% on another fight.

I have the nourish glyph and the regrowth glyph working in tandem right now, while I wait for the WG glyph to be discovered by a guildie or put on the AH for a semi-reasonable price. Regrowth is still doggedly keeping up with Nourish as far as same percent-healing done, due to its powerful HoT component, which in turn buffs nourish on the tank... so I don't think its percentage is from me still having the regrowth glyph.